Brother's Keeper

by C. E. Smith

  About the Author

  Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, C. E. Smith studied English at Stanford and medicine at Vanderbilt. In 2013, he won Shakespeare & Company’s international Paris Literary Prize. He lives with his wife and children in Nashville, Tennessee. Brother’s Keeper is his first novel.

  Brother’s Keeper

  C. E. Smith

  ATLANTIC BOOKS

  London

  Copyright page

  First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © C. E. Smith, 2015

  The moral right of C. E. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 425 9

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 426 6

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  Dedication

  For Brooke

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  Acknowledgements

  1

  The squawking radio, some kind of prayer, is torture to Burkett’s head­ache. The driver speaks no English, or so it seems when Burkett asks him to lower the volume. He’d lower it himself, sacrilege or no, but a wire partition confines him to the back of the cab.

  They’re next in line at a military checkpoint, where a one-armed man with the dark skin of a native Khandari endures a painstaking search despite his advanced age. The old man watches impassively as the sol­diers, in flagrant disregard for the standstill traffic, mount his wooden flatbed and jostle the sisal bales and overcrowded birdcages. It could be the missing arm that aroused their suspicion: he could have blown it off making bombs.

  Whatever the case, their scrutiny doesn’t bode well for Burkett, even if he just cleared customs without a problem, and even if most of the drugs he’s carrying are perfectly legal. Of the hundred or so packages of antibiotics, he’ll simply repeat what he said less than an hour ago at the airport: these medicines have been donated to the people of Khandaros, to a clinic that treats the poor free of charge.

  But his personal stash of Xanax and Valium, a week’s worth, could earn him up to ten years in prison. A week for ten years: it seems on the surface like the risk of a madman, but only a pharmacist or a certain type of addict would notice the discrepancies of pills and labels. At least that’s what he’s been telling himself in the days since his summons to this impoverished island.

  The drug laws here are rather harsh for a new democracy boasting social reform: life in prison for a kilogram of marijuana, death for five grams of heroin. In some ways, nothing has changed since the draconian years of Quadri the Behemoth. It is well and good to disband the secret police, to hold fair trials and rock concerts, but to Burkett’s way of think­ing, the concept of westernization isn’t complete without some degree of permissiveness in the area of pharmacology.

  But he isn’t worried. The customs inspector at the airport hardly both­ered with his shaving kit, much less any pills inside. Why should he expect any different from troops at a checkpoint? They have more important things to consider, like their fledgling government’s war with Islamic mili­tants. They wouldn’t waste their time on minimally addictive drugs when a suicide bomber could be sitting in the very next car.

  The driver shuts off the radio as he pulls up to the checkpoint. Burkett welcomes the silence, though in a way it grants the soldiers a measure of respect he isn’t sure they deserve. There are signs of poor discipline: an unsnapped holster, a missed belt loop, even food stains on the taller one’s shirt. Burkett doubts he’d concern himself with such superficial details if the two men weren’t armed with assault rifles.

  ‘Salam,’ the taller one says, studying Burkett. ‘Passport, please.’

  Burkett hands his passport through the window. He waits while the soldier confers with someone in a parked SUV. He hears the word ‘Ameri­can’ and the SUV’s door opens. This one is older, more professional in his bearing. A member of the old guard, Burkett guesses, maybe a player in the coup nearly twenty years ago that brought an end to the ancient line of kings and paved the way for Quadri.

  The older officer flicks through Burkett’s passport. He reads the name aloud – Ryan as ‘Ron’, Burkett as ‘Buckett’ – and lifts his sunglasses for a closer look at the picture, which shows Burkett in the goatee he wore during medical school.

  ‘What is your profession, sir?’

  ‘I’m a surgeon,’ Burkett says, which draws a look of confusion. ‘A doctor,’ he says. ‘But I’m here for personal reasons.’

  In the heat Burkett wants to follow the driver’s lead and get out of the cab, but the soldier blocks the door while trying to compare the pass­port photograph to the real thing. He takes much longer than necessary, perhaps because of the goatee, and eventually shakes his head as though resigned to the impossibility of verification.

  ‘Why empty?’ he asks, thumbing through the pages.

  Perhaps he thinks the new passport is fake. The single stamp represents his first international trip in years.

  ‘I haven’t had much time for travel,’ Burkett says. How could he explain more than a decade of surgical training at less than minimum wage?

  The soldier slides the passport into his shirt pocket. He yawns and mutters something to the cab driver, who reaches through the window and pops the trunk.

  Burkett gets out to watch while his luggage is searched for the second time today. The soldier lifts the shaving kit by its strap, the pills inside faintly rattling, but sets it aside in favor of a stethoscope. Holding it up he grins and says, ‘Doctor surgeon’, as if only now comprehending Burkett’s profession.

  He opens the duffel of antibiotics and begins shuffling through the boxes as if looking for a particular label. If he had such difficulty with the word ‘doctor’, what could he possibly learn from a pharmaceutical box? He opens a package and draws out a plastic card with rows of tablets in transparent domes. He squints at the words on the peel-away back.

  ‘Ciprofloxacin,’ Burkett says.

  Apparently satisfied that Burkett isn’t smuggling narcotics, the soldier moves on to the other duffel, which produces a froth of mosquito netting as he pulls back the zipper.

  ‘What is this?’ the man asks.

  Mosquito netting works just as well, if not better, than the expensive mesh surgeons typically use for repairing hernias. Burkett makes cutting gestures and points to his groin, but the soldier has lost int
erest. He’s found something else buried in the duffel. His hands emerge from the white folds with a bottle of bourbon.

  ‘This for surgery too?’ the officer asks. Is he making a joke?

  ‘Duty free,’ Burkett says. ‘Do you understand duty free?’

  The officer rotates the bottle, appraising the label.

  ‘Do you understand the prison?’ he asks.

  Burkett remains silent. He’d gathered online that the ban on alcohol applied only in name, and almost never to foreigners or non-Muslims. The customs agent at the airport was so preoccupied with the antibiotics and their expiration dates that he hardly seemed to notice the bourbon. Or rather he noticed but chose to avoid the paperwork of reporting it.

  ‘Pardon me,’ the officer says, and carries the duffel to the SUV. When he returns with the bag, Burkett can tell from the lighter weight that his duty free bourbon has been confiscated.

  ‘Can I have my passport?’ Burkett asks.

  ‘There is a fine for liquor,’ he replies, fanning himself with Burkett’s passport. ‘The fine is one hundred dollars American.’

  The cab deposits him at a crowded intersection supposedly in the vicin­ity of the medical complex. He unfolds a map but without knowing the street names he can’t even be sure of his own location. In the niche of a doorway, he sets down his luggage and sorts through his backpack. Both of his flasks are empty and yet he finds himself unscrewing the caps and hoping a drop might fall on his parched tongue. From his shaving kit he takes two pills, swallowing them dry.

  A boy sits in the shade with a pair of wooden crutches that look like Victorian relics except for the armpit cushions of duct tape and foam. At the sight of Burkett the boy, whose left leg is encased in plaster, extends his open hand. Burkett offers a five-dollar bill, which the boy receives in silence.

  In the cab he had only limited success with his Arabic–English diction­ary, but again he opens it and speaks the words for ‘hospital’ and ‘morgue’. The boy says something and points in the direction of a cylindrical tower that stands out for its height as well as its covering of elaborate fretwork.

  To reach it Burkett has to navigate a warren of crowded alleys and side streets congested with stalled traffic. A welter of humanity fills the court­yard outside the building, no doubt the encamped families and friends of patients. Women in burqas sell food and bottled drinks from an old refrigerator turned on its back. A group of elder Khandaris with seashells in their beards stand around a brazier and glare at the passing white man. Children gather around him, a swarm of brushing hands.

  He crosses an ambulance bay and enters the hospital through sliding glass doors. He pauses at a security desk, expecting to be questioned, but the uniformed guard merely smiles and nods. In the crowded waiting area he checks his pockets and realizes his smartphone has been stolen, probably by the urchins in the courtyard. There is no way of knowing. He glances toward the security desk but there’s no point. At least his phone was password protected. At least he still has the disposable he purchased at the airport.

  Patients lie on beds parked in the hallway, leaving little room to pass. He tries to keep his luggage from bumping the bedrails and IV catheters. A frail jaundiced woman reaches for him, and he feels a chill at the touch of her fingers. He searches her face for some hint as to the meaning of her feverish muttering, but her eyes suggest delirium.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Many of the signs have English translations, so he’s able to find an information desk manned by another security guard. On the wall hangs a photograph of President Djohar, the self-proclaimed reformer who came to power in this island nation’s first free and fair election. One of his earli­est duties as president was to supervise the hanging of his predecessor, but the televised event became an embarrassment when the gallows fractured under the Behemoth’s weight. Burkett wonders if this was the hospital where the former dictator languished for months in a coma before his eventual death obviated the need for a second hanging.

  The security guard’s irritated look softens when Burkett asks for the morgue. Mumbling into his shoulder radio, the guard escorts him to the elevator. They descend two floors and pass through an abandoned ward where empty patient rooms form a circumference around the nursing station. They take a staircase down yet another level, and in a subterranean corridor Burkett has to stoop to keep from bumping the rusted, antiquated pipes, which in some cases are suspended by frayed rope.

  They come to a metal door with an intercom. The guard holds down the button, producing a buzz so muffled as to seem buried. From down the hall comes an elderly physician in a white coat stained with what looks like blood. His expression of surprise makes Burkett wonder if he heard the buzzer at all. The guard speaks into his walkie-talkie and turns down the dim passage, ignoring Burkett’s thanks.

  The physician puts on his glasses for a better look at the American. Recognition passes over his face: he knows why Burkett is here.

  ‘I am Dr Abdullah, chief of pathology,’ he says.

  The doctor waves his name-badge over a sensor, the metal door unlatches, and Burkett follows him into an anteroom where shelves are stacked with protective gowns, gloves, and masks. At the doctor’s urging, Burkett leaves his bags, but he’s reluctant to set them on the floor, this being a morgue, so he hangs his backpack from one of the hooks and props his two duffels in a chair.

  They put on rubber gloves and surgical caps and walk through an autopsy suite, where three cadavers lie covered on stainless steel tables. One of the heads is exposed, a man in his forties or fifties with a full beard and ligature marks on the neck.

  The next chamber is lined with freezer doors. After checking a hand­written chart on the wall, the doctor pulls open one of the freezers. He slides out a body bag on a tray. He unzips the bag, exposing a face identi­cal to Burkett’s except for the pallor and bruising. The doctor brings over a metal folding chair but Burkett refuses to sit down.

  ‘Show me,’ he says, waving a hand over the body.

  ‘Are you sure?’ the doctor asks.

  Burkett doesn’t need to reply. The doctor pulls down the zipper. There are incisions from shoulders to pubis, stitched with twine. Two gunshot wounds to the chest, no visible powder burns. Burkett turns the body on its side looking for the exit wounds, but there are none.

  The doctor holds up a finger and mumbles, ‘Pardon,’ and disappears through a door.

  Burkett can make out the knot in the left clavicle – an old wrestling injury from their time at Penn State. His brother became something of a legend for winning the national championship despite having sustained that fracture during the second period of the final match. Of the twins Owen was always the better wrestler. He was a better surgeon, too.

  There are contusions on the right hand, and when Burkett lifts it he feels the shifting fragments of bone: a boxer’s fracture, which means Owen must have hit someone very hard.

  The pathologist returns with the bullets, amorphous lumps of metal in separate plastic bags.

  ‘Kalashnikov,’ the doctor says.

  He conducts Burkett into a small windowless office cluttered with textbooks and journals, the walls adorned with diplomas. On the desk Burkett recognizes a recent issue of The Lancet. It is an office no different from those he might have found in the department of surgery back at Emory.

  Burkett signs a series of documents, most of them in English. He’s given copies of the autopsy report, death certificate, and – the doctor nearly forgot – a large manila envelope containing the items found on the body: wallet, keys, belt, a pocket notepad, and a cross on a lanyard. Right away he sees that something is missing.

  ‘He wore a silver ring,’ Burkett says.

  Dr Abdullah gives an apologetic shrug and says, ‘There was nothing else.’ He absently pats his pockets, which seems for a moment like grounds for suspicion, but
it turns out he’s only looking for another pen.

  ‘I understand from the embassy that you would prefer cremation,’ the doctor says.

  ‘That’s right,’ Burkett replies. ‘It’s what he wanted.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘No,’ he says, smiling. ‘We have a – what is the word? Oven?’

  ‘Crematorium?’

  He nods. ‘Crematorium. Yes, this is forbidden by Islam, but the natives do request it.’ He shrugs. ‘The graveyards are filling up, so to speak, and very expensive.’

  2

  On the ground floor of Burkett’s hotel is a bistro frequented by journalists and aid workers. Sandbags and poured concrete shut out the midday sun. He doesn’t mind: when drinking he prefers an atmosphere of perpetual twilight. No alcohol on the menu, but the waiter, who seems hardly surprised by Burkett’s order, serves him bourbon in a porcelain teacup.

  His brother’s notepad bears signs of long hours in a back pocket – sweat stains, crushed rings, the pages molded in a vaguely gluteal curve. Burkett pages through the lists of drugs and medical supplies, trying to see something of his brother in the handwriting, the minuscule letters that look like claw prints. He reads the list of items necessary for a lumbar puncture, the differential diagnosis for optic neuritis. There are occa­sional verses and snippets of prayer.

  Grant me the words to pray as You’d have me pray.

  When Nick Lorie arrives, half an hour late, Burkett’s on his third bourbon but not as drunk as he’d like.

  ‘Welcome to the Rock,’ Nick says as they shake hands.

  A former Navy Seal, Nick bears little resemblance to the soldier Burkett envisioned from their correspondence. He has a beard and mussed hair, and he’s shorter than Burkett. Tattoos cover his forearms – geometric patterns, cross thatch grids or jagged lines in parallel – but none of it, as far as Burkett can tell, suggests any kind of military affiliation.